Collected Poems (46 page)

And they’d have seen that you were confident, full of yourself: an “uppity nigger.”

However they’d have put it to themselves, they’d have believed that by insulting you

they could denigrate King with you, debase what he’d stood for, demonstrate to you

that if you thought he had released you from the trap of history you were deluded.

But there would have been even more they’d have wanted to be sure you understood,

were ready to break their fists on you, maim or kill you so that you’d understand:

that their world would prevail, that authority, power, and absolute physical coercion

with no ethical dimension whatsoever must and will precede all and resolve all

and break everything down again and again into an unqualified dominion of force.

All that would have passed between you in an instant, what came next, though,

would have driven their rage to a level where you knew the situation might explode:

it was their suspicion, and your certainty, that even if they did apparently intimidate you,

they couldn’t make you renounce in yourself the conviction of your moral worth,

the inextinguishable truth that would supersede even what might seem submission.

4.

Wasn’t that what would have made you know you’d have to turn and go around them?

Surely your fury outstripped your fear, but didn’t you make a truce with them, and a wager?

The truce was your walking away and their acceptance of that as a sign of compliance;

the wager, on their part, was that in your pretense of capitulation there’d be uncertainty,

that one day you’d have to forgive yourself for your humiliation, and wouldn’t be able to.

And wasn’t the wager on your side that though you might be hurt by your seeming yielding,

the lesion of your doubt, your shame and possible self-accusations would be outweighed

by knowing that nothing would have justified letting them exert their thuggery on you,

that, no matter what they believed, they wouldn’t, couldn’t have negated your anger?

But wouldn’t your surrender have scorched you? Wasn’t that what you were saying to me?

Don’t tell me you know what I feel, and don’t give me that crap about being with us,

you wouldn’t know how to be with us, you don’t know the first thing about us.

For three hundred years we’ve coddled you, protected your illusions of innocence,

letting you go on thinking you’re pure: well you’re not pure, you’re the same as those pigs.

And please, please, don’t tell me again you can understand because you’re a Jew.

5.

A black man, a white man, three decades of history, of remembering and forgetting.

The day was Good Friday: after a long winter, the first warm, welcoming odors of spring.

People flowed to Independence Hall Park from all directions, everyone was subdued;

if there were tensions, they were constrained by our shared grief; we held hands.

The night before, though, in some cities there were riots: gunfire, soldiers, buildings burning.

Sometimes it’s hard to know why they stopped: I often think if I were black in America,

I might want to run riot myself with the sheer hypocritical unendingness of it all:

a so-called politics of neglect, families savaged, communities fractured and abandoned.

Black man, white man: I can still see us, one standing stricken, the other stalking away;

I can still feel your anger, feel still because it’s still in me my helpless despair.

And will you by now have been able to leave behind the indignities and offense

of both halves of that morning? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do in our country;

aren’t we given to believe our wounds will heal, our scars fade, our insults be redeemed?

Later, during the service, when the “overcome” anthem was sung, I started to cry;

many others in the crowd around were crying, black and white, but I couldn’t see you.

Owen: Seven Days

for Owen Burns, born March 5, 1997

Well here I

go again into my

grandson’s eyes

seven days

old and he knows

nothing logic tells me

yet when I

look into his eyes

darkish grayish blue

a whole tone

lighter

than his mother’s

I feel myself almost

with a
whoosh

dragged

into his consciousness

and processed

processed processed

his brows knit

I’m in there now

I don’t know

in what form but

his gaze hasn’t

faltered an instant

though still his

brows knit and

knit as though to

get just right

what I am no

what I’m thinking

as though to get

what I’m thinking

just exactly right

in perplexity perhaps

his brows knit

once again

perhaps because

of how little

inscrutability

with which the

problem of me

is presented

not “Who are you?”

but more something

like “Why?

Why
are you? Out

there? Do you

know?”

then his eyelids

start to flutter

time to sleep

and once again with

something like

another
whoosh

I’m ejected back

out into my

world

bereft? no

but for an instant

maybe just a little

lonely just a

little desolated

just for a while

utterly confounded

by the sheer

propulsive

force of

being taken

by such love

Gas

Wouldn’t it be nice, I think, when the blue-haired lady in the doctor’s waiting room bends over the magazine table

and farts, just a little, and violently blushes, wouldn’t it be nice if intestinal gas came embodied in visible clouds

so she could see that her really quite inoffensive
pop
had only barely grazed my face before it drifted away?

Besides, for this to have happened now is a nice coincidence because not an hour ago, while we were on our walk,

my dog was startled by a backfire and jumped straight up like a horse bucking and that brought back to me

the stable I worked on weekends when I was twelve and a splendid piebald stallion who whenever he was mounted

would buck just like that, though more hugely, of course, enormous, gleaming, resplendent, and the woman,

her face abashedly buried in her
Elle
now, reminded me I’d forgotten that not the least part of my awe

consisted of the fact that with every jump he took the horse would powerfully fart,
fwap, fwap, fwap,

something never mentioned in the dozens of books about horses and their riders I devoured in those days.

All that savage grandeur, the steely glinting hooves, the eruptions driven from the creature’s mighty innards:

breath stopped, heart stopped, nostrils madly flared, I didn’t know if I wanted to break him or be him.

Last Things

for John Stewart

In a tray of dried fixative in a photographer friend’s darkroom,

I found a curled-up photo of his son the instant after his death,

his glasses still on, a drop of blood caught at his mouth.

Recently, my friend put a book together to commemorate his son;

near the end, there’s a picture taken the day before the son died;

the caption says: “This is the last photo of Alex.”

I’m sure my friend doesn’t know I’ve seen the other picture.

Is telling about it a violation of confidence?

Before I show this to anyone else, I’ll have to ask his permission.

If you’re reading it, you’ll know my friend pardoned me,

that he found whatever small truth his story might embody

was worth the anguish of remembering that reflexive moment

when after fifty years of bringing reality into himself through a lens,

his camera doubtlessly came to his eye as though by itself,

and his finger, surely also of its own accord, convulsed the shutter.

The Lie

As one would praise a child or dog, or punish it,

as one would chastise it, or hit it,
hit
it;

as one would say,
sit, sit down, be still:

so don’t we discipline ourselves, disparage,

do as thoughtlessly unto ourselves?

As one would tell a lie, a faithless lie,

not with good intention, to obviate a harm,

but just to have one’s way, to win,
prevail:

so don’t we deceive ourselves,

and not even know we are?

A self which by definition cannot tell

itself untruths, yet lies, which, wanting

to tell itself untruths, isn’t able to, not then,

and would like sometimes not to know

it’s lied, but can’t deny it has, not then.

And our righteousness before ourselves,

how we’re so barbarous towards ourselves,

so mercilessly violate ourselves;

as one would never, with a loved one, harm,

never, with a dear one, strike, not
strike.

As one would with an enemy, implacable,

as one would with an animal, intractable,

as one would with a self which savagely resists:

this amputating, this assailing, this self-slashing.

As one would lie, as one so fervently would lie.

The Nail

Some dictator or other had gone into exile, and now reports were coming about his regime,

the usual crimes, torture, false imprisonment, cruelty and corruption, but then a detail:

that the way his henchmen had disposed of enemies was by hammering nails into their skulls.

Horror, then, what mind does after horror, after that first feeling that you’ll never catch your breath,

mind imagines — how not be annihilated by it? — the preliminary tap, feels it in the tendons of the hand,

feels the way you do with
your
nail when you’re fixing something, making something, shelves, a bed;

the first light tap to set the slant, and then the slightly harder tap, to embed the tip a little more …

No, no more: this should be happening in myth, in stone, or paint, not in reality, not here;

it should be an emblem of itself, not itself, something that would
mean,
not really have to happen,

something to go out, expand in implication from that unmoved mass of matter in the breast;

as in the image of an anguished face, in grief for us, not us as us, us as in a myth, a moral tale,

a way to tell the truth that grief is limitless, a way to tell us we must always understand

it’s we who do such things, we who set the slant, embed the tip, lift the sledge and drive the nail,

drive the nail which is the axis upon which turns the brutal human world upon the world.

Canal

The almost deliciously ill, dank, dark algae on the stone of its sides,

the putrid richness of its flow which spontaneously brings forth refuse,

dead fish, crusts, condoms, all slowly surging in its muck of gruel,

under the tonnage of winter sky which darkens everything still more,

soils the trash, fruit, paper, dead leaves, water, impossibly still more.

Yet trudging, freezing, along beside it, I seem taken by it, to be of it,

its shape, its ooze; in the biting wind it and I make one single thing,

this murky, glass-hard lid with gulls fixed in it lifting and falling,

this dulled sheet, dense as darkness, winding by indifferent buildings,

we compose a single entity, a unity, not as fanciful speculation

but as though one actually might be the sentient mind of something,

as though only watching this indolent swell would bring into me

all that ever touched it, went across, perished and dissolved in it,

all caught lymphlike in this mortal trench, this ark, this cognizance;

a craving spirit flung across it, a tranquil stillness deep within it.

The Dance

A middle-aged woman, quite plain, to be polite about it, and somewhat stout, to be more courteous still,

but when she and the rather good-looking, much younger man she’s with get up to dance,

her forearm descends with such delicate lightness, such restrained but confident ardor athwart his shoulder,

drawing him to her with such a firm, compelling warmth, and moving him with effortless grace

into the union she’s instantly established with the not at all rhythmically solid music in this second-rate café,

that something in the rest of us, some doubt about ourselves, some sad conjecture, seems to be allayed,

nothing that we’d ever thought of as a real lack, nothing not to be admired or be repentant for,

but something to which we’ve never adequately given credence,

which might have consoling implications about how we misbelieve ourselves, and so the world,

that world beyond us which so often disappoints, but which sometimes shows us, lovely, what we are.

Biopsy

Have I told you, love, about the experience

I used to have before I knew you?

At first it seemed a dream — I’d be in bed —

then I’d realize I was awake, which made it —

it was already frightening — appalling.

A dense, percussive, pulsing hum,

too loud to bear as soon as I’d hear it,

it would become a coil of audible matter

tightening over me, so piercing

I was sure I’d tear apart in it.

I’d try to say a word to contradict it,

but its hold on me was absolute,

I was paralyzed; then, my terror